


the life you left behind

by Wildehack (Tyleet)



Series: Star Wars Works [12]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:04:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6509764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes people in the Resistance act like Finn grew up in a bacta tank. Or a trash compactor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the life you left behind

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of goes with 'gone are the days of begging' and 'your cradle escaped the sea', but tbh all of my finn fic sort of fits together in one verse anyway. 
> 
> Also, there is a very brief mention of amputation.

Sometimes people in the Resistance act like Finn grew up in a bacta tank. Or a trash compactor. 

Like because he grew up in the First Order, he somehow missed being a human in the galaxy, and can’t possibly know what Ebla ale is, or who won last year’s Corvon Awards, or what it means when someone bites his lip and smiles at you, slow and easy from across a crowded room. But the First Order wasn’t like that. Or at least, it wasn’t like that in the trooper program. It wouldn’t have  _worked_ , if they were all being raised like monks.   
  
The First Order required obedience, and you don’t get loyalty with deprivation. You don’t live and die for a world that never makes you happy. Cadets might be conditioned and brainwashed from birth, but they’re not stupid. They cared about the First Order, and every one of them would gladly die in its defense. How could you care if you weren’t convinced you were happy?   
  
(Something Finn chooses not to think about, but that sometimes occurs to him just before he falls asleep: if the First Order had asked him to die for them instead of kill for them, he might never have run away.)  
  
These are the things that made Eight-Seven happy, growing up:   
  
History. He was good at history. He knew all the stories, backwards and forwards-–the Clone Wars, the fall of the Old Republic, the last stand at Jakku, the Trillia Massacre. His history tutor gave him a book on the Organa Rebellion, his to keep, and the download didn’t disappear after the course ended. He read that book over and over, when he was younger-–he knew every battle by heart, every failure the Empire made. He knew the names of all the generals, the maneuvers Captain Antilles and Private Skywalker pioneered in the battle of Yavin, and he’d composed several simulations on what the Empire could have done to block those attacks. His tutor had called the simulations “strategically flawless.” He thought, in private, proud moments, that maybe this meant he was officer material.   
  
(You  _could_  rise in the ranks. It was rare, but everyone knew Phasma had gone through the program from birth, same as the rest of them. When he was a young cadet, he’d wanted to _be_  her when he grew up. That had changed, once she actually became his commanding officer, but he still remembered being twelve and fantasizing about having a red pauldron on his shoulder.)   
  
Music. Officially, the First Order only permitted music in conditioning for cadets under three. Unofficially, the First Order didn’t care what the hell they listened to, so long as it didn’t interfere with performance. Potentially seditious music was always discovered in conditioning, anyway. Eight-Seven loved music, Miranda and The Machinists and The Opals and Succor constantly streaming during his downtime. 

Whenever they put in at a new base, he hacked into the local airspace, quietly raiding their music stores. It was worth a fair amount, in the cadet barracks. He once traded Nines twelve compactor hours for the new Lan Turncoat demo. Even wading up to his hips in liquid garbage trying to avoid the shit eel was bearable with the exhilarating pulse of “Orphan, Run” vibrating in his helmet. His heartbeat and his breath sped up to match the beat until his whole body was electric with happiness, and when they pulled him up out of the night soil tank he was grinning huge and careless, recklessly joyful.   
  
(Conditioning didn’t catch everything, because they only only knew what you knew, what you could articulate to them. Succor’s fifth album stayed in Eight-Seven’s collection because he didn’t think The Dust of Alderaan was seditious. It was about the Empire, not the First Order, and if it had an obvious pacifist agenda it was really about the singer’s pain, not her political beliefs. He used to listen to it before falling asleep, letting the wave of her loss and grief and love wash over him, dazzling and inchoate, like a feeling he’d experienced once but couldn’t quite remember.) 

Friends. Eight-Seven hadn’t had a _lot_  of friends, but he had  _some_. There was his year-mate Seven-Two, who’d gone through the créche with him, and always laughed at the impressions he did of the practicals tutor. She sat with him in the mess sometimes, even after they’d been assigned to different units, and she’d let her ankle bump against his and they’d argue about whether Yric Bettle or Mia Kolombini was a better drummer. She died when they were fourteen, when the training base was infiltrated by an assassin from the New Republic. She stepped in front of a shot meant for a Knight of Ren. It was probably a kill shot to begin with, but the Knight used her limp body as a shield, and she was riddled with holes before the Knight got to cover. She got a post-mortem commendation for it, presented to her unit leader by Commander Hux himself.   
  
There was Nines and Zero, who hadn’t _liked_  him but who’d resentfully loved him, the way you couldn’t help loving everyone in your unit, just because you knew them so well and you served with them so long. Nines was really into bootlegged Coruscanti holodramas, and the four of them would sit up at night and crowd around Zero’s piecemeal holoprojector, and watch whatever random episode Nines had managed to get hold of, even though it always picked up in the middle, and they never got to see how things ended. They used to lie in their separate beds at lights out and cobble together satisfying endings for _Kashyyk Nights_  and  _Son of Telos_. Zero was the best at it, but the rest of them would help—so Eight-Seven might say _what if the pirate queen got shot on a raid_ , and Slip might say _and maybe the ship was out of bacta,_ and Nines might say _but it wasn’t a kill shot, okay_ , and then Zero would hum for a little bit in the dark before grinning and telling them how it all turned out—the pirate queen took a blaster to the thigh but kept fighting, and the ship’s doctor was angry because he secretly loved her and she shouldn’t have put weight on the wound, and she put her soft hands on his face and told him it was worth it, and that she had done her duty and now he must do his. Eight-Seven had nightmares about the part where the ship’s doctor had to cut her leg off even though it was _killing_ him and she was so brave she didn’t even scream, but he’d also loved it, made Zero retell it so many times that he had most of it memorized. Finn didn’t like to think that no one else in the galaxy knew that story, now.  
  
And there was Slip. His best friend, although he never quite thought about it like that. Slip didn’t resent him for having the best strategic scores and the best practical scores, the way everyone else did–-Slip was bad at everything, the way Eight-Seven was good at everything. He didn’t have a competitive bone in his body. Eight-Seven had drilled and coaxed and and bullied Slip into keeping up, even when he probably shouldn’t have, and Slip had drawn a little sketch of Eight-Seven’s face once, so he could see what he looked like. Slip would slide into his bunk after lights out and let Eight-Seven tell him everything he knew about the Opals, even though he’d heard it a billion times before, and the next day Eight-Seven would come back for Slip when he fell behind in training, even though he knew he shouldn’t.   
  
Shore leave. They were a standing army of natural-born humans.  _Obviously_ they needed shore leave, sometimes, in order to operate with maximum efficiency. It was a privilege you earned as soon as you started serving on a starship. Jakku might have been his first mission on the ground, but his unit had done four rotations on the Tarkin before being promoted to the Finalizer. Eight-Seven knew about drinking, knew about dancing, knew about the wild overheated joy of seeing The Paranoiacs live. He also knew about slow smiles, Nines giving him a thumbs-up from across the bar, letting someone with a nice face and warm hands tug him away from the dance floor.   
  
(It didn’t really compare to Slip, smiling against Eight-Seven’s shoulder in the dark, both of them breathing open-mouthed and trying to be quiet. Still. It was nice to have a basis for comparison.)   
  
So many things that made Eight-Seven happy, and Finn misses them sometimes, without meaning to, the histories he knows, the ambitions he held, the stolen music and half-finished stories, the people he loved, the structure and shape of his life, the loyalty warm and true in his chest. Sometimes he even missed the food, just because it was familiar.   
  
And he’s glad he left, and he knows there were things that were terrible in his childhood–-knows Slip shouldn’t have ever been in the field, knows Seven-Two might have lived, knows they shouldn’t have cut that dream he used to have about his mother out of his mind.   
  
Sometimes he’ll mention something that he thinks is funny, or interesting, and Poe will go pale and Snap will turn red and Jessika will go flinty-eyed and he’ll know he’s said the wrong thing. He never even tells them about the bad stuff-–conditioning, the executions, the kids that were sent to the Supreme Commander and never came back. They still think he’s missing important things, that the First Order robbed him of vital, basic elements of personhood.

He doesn’t know how to say that he  _knows_  he was robbed, but he was a whole person anyway, the whole time. They all were.


End file.
